Internet Publishers, Bloggers Say No to New Fees
Will Rupert Murdoch be a pied piper for paid Internet news? I Want Media asked online publishers and bloggers if they plan to follow the old media titan into the world of new Web tolls. Many — but not all — said no ...
Context & Ripple Effects
Rupert Murdoch set this debate running in May 2009 when he declared the free-web-news era over and committed his titles to charging online. Since then the industry has been waiting to see who follows — with earlier signals pointing both ways: magazine publishers had already found that audiences migrated online without profit materializing (magazine publishers see future, but no profit, in the shift to Internet), while reader discussions argued people would pay for niche content and ad-free newspaper sites.
Against that backdrop, I Want Media put the question directly to online publishers and bloggers: many — but not all — say they will not impose new Web tolls. The split matters because Murdoch's move only becomes a template if others copy it, and this sounding suggests the follower camp is thinner than the rhetoric implied. It also lands amid ongoing pressure on free models, including Silicon Alley Insider's argument that the New York Times is nuts not to charge a subscription fee.
First-order effects
- The publishers and bloggers who answered no keep their pages open to search engines and aggregators, preserving the traffic and ad inventory that a toll would cut off overnight.
- Murdoch's paid-news push now proceeds largely alone among the surveyed publishers, making his own sites the live test case for whether readers will actually pay for general news online.
Second-order effects
- If Murdoch's tolls show meaningful revenue, holdout publishers face pressure to carve out premium tiers anyway — the outcome the 2007 niche-content argument anticipated — or risk being undercut as 'the same news, but free.'
- If the tolls underperform, advertisers gain leverage over free publishers, since the experiment would confirm that mass-audience economics still favor ad-funded distribution over reader fees.
Third-order effects
- The industry looks set to bifurcate structurally: commodity general news stays free and ad-supported at scale, while specialized or distinctive content migrates toward tolls — with each publisher's decision hinging on how replaceable its journalism is.
- A fragmented payment landscape would raise the strategic value of whoever aggregates or bundles paid content across publishers, a role platforms and search engines are positioned to contest.
The trend: News publishing is dividing into a free, advertising-scaled tier and a Murdoch-led paid tier, with individual publishers betting on whichever side their content's scarcity supports.